Capitalism Violence and The State - Crime Corruption and Entrepreneurship in An Indian Company Town

Journal of Legal Anthropology (2010) Vol. 1, No.
2:165-188

ISSN 1758-9576 (Print); ISSN 1758-9584 (Online)
[DOI:10.4059/jla.2010.2611]
www. anthropologies-in-translation.org
2010 Aequitas Publishing

165

Capitalism, Violence and The State:
Crime, Corruption and Entrepreneurship in
an Indian Company Town

ANDREW SANCHEZ

In the Tata company town of Jamshedpur, incisive popular discourses of
corruption posit a mutually beneficial relationship between legitimate
institutions and organised criminality, a dynamic believed to enable pervasive
transformations in the citys industrial and financial infrastructures. This
article situates this local discourse within the wider body of anthropological
work on South Asian corruption, noting a discursive departure from the
hegemonic, personalised and essentially provincialising corruption models
encountered by many researchers. The article interrogates the popular model
of crime and corruption in Jamshedpur through a focus upon the business
practices of local violent entrepreneurs, exploring the extent to which their
negotiations with corrupt institutions and legitimate capital may indeed
inform their successes. Drawing analytic cues from material on organised
crime in the former USSR, this article identifies a mutually beneficial
relationship between political influence, violence and industrial capital in an
Indian company town.

! Key words Crime, Corruption, Entrepreneurship, Violence, Capital

Introduction: Indias Wild West

Whilst I was conducting ethnographic fieldwork in Jamshedpur in March
2007, the citys Member of Parliament, Sunil Mahato was assassinated.
Mahato had been the guest of honour at a local football match when Maoist
guerrillas stormed the stadium and opened fire, killing him and several
members of his entourage. Within days, rumours began to circulate within the
city that Mahato had met his end due to a less than ideological difference of
opinion with his assailants. Both popular and local media consensus held that

Journal of Legal Anthropology


166
Mahatos infamous negotiations with mafia syndicates had eventually claimed
his life.
1
This assertion was vehemently denied by the local party wing of the
Maoist uprising, which held that he had been executed as a chamcha
2
of the
states industrial corporations.
3

By the end of the week, the Times of India addressed Mahatos
assassination in an editorial provocatively entitled Indias Wild West. The
article tacitly supported a reading of the region as an anarchic frontier where:
the gun dictated the law. Mahatos death, the article claimed, was but one in
a long line of provincial disputes, in which personalised disagreements all too
often degenerated into senseless violence.
4
This Wild West model is an
elaboration upon a discourse of the Jungle Raj which portrays Bihar and
Jharkhand as a violent pre-modern backwater, distant and distinct from the
shopping malls and stock markets of metropolitan India. Bihar and Jharkhand
do have long standing and periodically very serious issues of law and order.
Levels of violent crime, in particular, are significantly higher than the national
average. Murder accounts for 4.73% of all reported crimes in Jharkhand,
against a national average of 1.83% (Bhandari and Kale 2007: 86). In the
regions urban areas, this bias becomes more pronounced; in the city of Patna,
the murder rate is 23 times as high as that of Kolkata (Dreze and Khera 2000:
335-352).
The Jungle Raj discourse which builds upon these troubling facts is
essentially a provincialising one, which argues that many of Bihar and
Jharkhands problems in this regard are both a symptom and expression of a
localised culture of violence. As was frequently articulated to me by
metropolitan Indians and the mainly Bengali management cadre of local Tata
industry, Biharis and Jharkhandi Adivasis had violence and sectarianism in
their blood (Sanchez 2010). The regions problems with crime were therefore
as much a matter of passion as they were of planning, and as such were liable
to resist the well meaning authority of central government. Where discussed,
the so called Mafias of Bihar and Jharkhand were accordingly presented as
distinctly local institutions, which drew upon pre-existing identities of caste
and ethnicity to define both their membership and interests.
Based on ethnographic research conducted in Jamshedpur among
industrial workers, trade unionists and violent entrepreneurs, this article
attempts to construct a more empirically substantiated model of the ways in
which organised criminality in the Jungle Raj actually works, and the ways in
which the regions people discuss, conceptualise and critique it. In doing so, I
pursue two complementary lines of analysis. Firstly, I respond to the Jungle
Raj model through the case studies of the murder of a local trade unionist and
the extra-legal escapades of a senior state politician. Rather than being
directionless outpourings of local lawlessness, I argue that moments of
organised violence must be considered as instrumental political actions. In this
instance, I demonstrate that the 1995 assassination of Tata Workers Union
president VG Gopal played a crucial role in enabling a transformation of
Jamshedpurs employment regimes, and that the murder of the Jharkhand
CAPITALISM, VIOLENCE AND THE STATE SANCHEZ

167
chief ministers personal aide was closely related to a well publicised
corruption scandal in the national government. Rather than being distinct
from the entrepreneurship of neo-liberal India, Jharkhands goondas
5
may
well play an integral role in the states political, industrial and financial
infrastructures. In developing this argument, I draw upon the large body of
Post Soviet and Italian ethnography, history and political science, which
identifies the role that violence plays in the operation of industrial and
financial capitalism.
Secondly, I note that popular corruption discourses in Jamshedpur
respond accordingly to the social context in which they are constructed;
namely they identify the use of violence to explain political authority,
industrial profitability and the failure of collective action. These incisive and
critical discourses challenge anthropological analyses which posit popular
Indian understandings of corruption to either inflate the phenomenon or else
personalise and localise it in such a way that relationships between elites and
bureaucratic functionaries are obscured. I argue that in this regional context,
prevalent institutional corruption and organised crime are mutually
constitutive and as such require a somewhat different analytic framework with
which to approach the discourses surrounding them.
The latter half of the article takes these observations on the role and
perception of institutional violence in Jamshedpurs economy and tests them
against the business practices of two of Jamshedpurs violent entrepreneurs.
A largely descriptive ethnographic account of the fortunes of these
interlocutors demonstrates that entrepreneurial success in Jamshedpur relies
upon a mastery of corrupt institutional influence and organised criminal
violence. This material reveals that local corruption discourses on the
relationship between legitimate institutions, capital and violence are to some
extent well substantiated, and are as such politically incisive.

The Decline of a Company Town: Discourses of Institutional
Corruption

More than a million people currently call the Tata company town of
Jamshedpur home; the vast majority of residents are descendents of the
labour migrants who came to the region in the first half of the twentieth
century, displacing the local Adivasi tribal population

(Weiner 1978:161).
6
The
city is the site of the Tata Steel Plant which is arguably the first integrated
works of its kind in South Asia, having been built in 1904 by the industrialist
Jamshedji Tata, after whom the city is named (Bahl 1995; Fraser 1919; Pillai
1923). In Jamshedpur, Tata have historically provided not only jobs, but also
homes, schools, hospitals and utilities to all of their employees since the early
20
th
century; fulfilling many of the needs which outside of the company town
are normally met by the state.
The formalised permanent Tata workforce presented in Bahl's (1982)
account of 1920's Jamshedpur provides an early historical counterpoint to the



168
shifting and insecure modes of Indian proletariat production described by
Chandavarkar (1985, 1994, 1999) and Gooptu (2001). However, the company
town is a far from stable category, and following Indias economic
liberalisation of the 1990s, Tata struggled to maintain profitability against the
foreign capital and competition that flooded the domestic market. In an effort
to cut production costs, the past two decades have seen the majority of
permanent company positions in Jamshedpur casualised, taking with them the
right to Tata civic care for all but a minority of employees. In the late 1990s,
the proportion of casual workers in the Tata Motors plant where I conducted
several months of research was less than a quarter. As of 2006, the number of
casual employees had risen dramatically to 76%, their positions having been
made available through the early retirement of large numbers of older
workers. These casual workers were themselves almost entirely drawn from
traditional Tata families, many of whom explained their rapid descent down
the labour hierarchy with reference to a corruption within the Tata Workers
Union that refused to allow them membership.
Indias economic liberalisation of the early 1990s sought to capitalise on
the nations high rate of growth during the 1980s, which increased in the
manufacturing sector at almost double the rate (8%) of any other
industrialised nation (Corbridge and Harriss 2000: 147). Following Finance
Minister Manmohan Singhs 1991 budget, the Monopolies and Restrictive
Trade Practices Act was considerably relaxed and provision made for foreign
investment in certain industries of up to 51% of total equity.
7
In addition,
tariffs on imports were lowered and the state began to directly invest more
heavily in manufacturing infrastructure (Guha 1990: 45).
Throughout the 1990s, both Tata Steel and Tatas automobile venture,
Telco were increasingly unable to match the progress of more dynamic Indian
firms that utilised, rather than competed against growing foreign investment.
Companies such as car manufacturer Maruti, entered into partnership with
foreign firms and shifted their production to largely automated plants,
producing lower cost, higher specification vehicles. After narrowly avoiding
bankruptcy in 2003, Telco was rebranded Tata Motors, and a large scale
expansion of their casual workforce embarked upon, significantly lowering
labour costs (Sanchez 2010).
In Jamshedpur early resistance to casualisation had been mounted by the
president of the Tata Workers Union, V.G. Gopal, who deemed early
retirement and mass casualisation to be antithetical to the principles of
collective action. However, Gopal was something of a lone voice within the
union, the majority of whose committee members supported Tatas casual
labour initiatives; support which the majority of my shopfloor interlocutors
deemed to be motivated by company bribe taking. In October 1993, V.G.
Gopal was shot on the steps of the union's office as he left his car, somewhat
curtailing his effectiveness. When I visited the unions building in January
2006, his vehicle was still parked where it was 12 years ago, with flat tires,
slowly rusting away. This decaying monument was complemented by a bronze

169
bust of Gopal which graced the buildings entrance, garlanded with marigolds.
I was told by the present union bureaucrats that he had been killed by
gangsters.
In fact, Gopal had not been simply killed by gangsters; he had been
assassinated at the behest of one of his fellow union committee members,
Amrendra Kumar Singh. Singh had indeed hired local goondas for the actual
shooting but in 2006 was nevertheless found guilty of murder himself. During
his trial, it was the prosecution's contention that the plot had involved a large
number of individuals from the union and Jamshedpur's criminal underworld,
a line of inquiry that was hampered by the disappearance and suspected
murder of a number of key suspects in the intervening years. The Indian
Central Bureau of Investigation issued statements to the effect that the two
suspected gunmen had probably been murdered by their co-conspirators.
8

Convicted of Gopals murder, Amrendra Kumar Singh is currently
serving a life sentence in prison. The unions official stance is that he was
jealous of the presidents control, craving the position himself. The murder is
therefore presented as a personalised and emotive affair. However, Gopal was
the only high ranking officer from the TWU who attempted to resist
casualisation in Tata Steel, and it was popularly believed by many city
residents that it was his stance on this matter, rather than any personal feud,
that motivated the killing. One individual, himself a high ranking Tata officer
even went so far as to allege to me that senior Tata Steel management had
paid for the assassination; emphasising the role of violence and organised
criminal negotiations within the transformation of a company town labour
regime.
As the Tata Workers Union (TWU) was at the heart of the Tata
working class creation in the industrial disputes of the 1920s, so it seemed to
play a central role to the unravelling of their security during the first decade of
the 21
st
century (Bahl 1982, 1995). To whit, the casualisation process has one
important characteristic, which is that all casual workers are denied
membership of the Tata Workers Union and as such cannot rely upon that
organisation to petition for either regularisation or the increase of casual wage
rates. Key to the popular corruption discourses of Jamshedpurs industrial
workers was the contention that the unions refusal to represent casual
workers was itself motivated by company bribe taking; an exercise of corrupt
self interest that is popularly related to the interests of industrial capitalism
and economic liberalisation. This is a very particular form of corruption
discourse, which as suggested in the introduction to this article, is of a
politically critical nature, and which directs itself towards not only the
character and morality of given actors and institutions, but the relationships
between them. For their part the Tata company effectively supports the
deunionising of casual workers through its closed-shop policy, which stipulates
sole company negotiation with an officially recognised worker organisation; in
this case the TWU.
9
As such, discourses surrounding the casualisation of Tata
labour draw upon the intersection of elite union self interest, large scale



170
economic change, legislative complicity and violence.
Jan Breman notes a similar failure of collective action in his discussion of
the decline of the Ahmedabad textile industry from the 1980s, in which the
Textile Labour Association (TLA) is said to be comprised of political climbers
in the Congress Party; possessed of neither the competence nor compulsion to
fight for their members interests. In this particular corruption discourse
then, elite self interest is similarly the Achilles Heel of collective action;
indeed, the result of the union's antipathy was the dismissal of huge numbers
of workers and the eventual 'unmaking' of Ahmedabad's industrial working
class (Breman 2004: 163). However, there are a number of differences
between these contexts, which illuminate the nature of corruption discourse in
Jamshedpur.
Crucially, where in Breman's study the union is perceived to be
incompetent and self interested (ibid.), in Jamshedpur its leaders are
perceived to be actively criminal. What affords and defines this perception is a
more systematic focus upon the political and economic processes of
corruption. Where Bremans interlocutors primarily identify the nature of
their union leaders (self interested, ambitious, yet incompetent), in
Jamshedpur primacy is given to the productive function of the relationships
between union leaders and other agents, such as the Tata company, the state
and organised crime. The business models to which both cases relate are also
rather different, although both represent the 'unmaking' of an industrial
workforce in varying degrees. In Bremans case, the emphasis is primarily
upon large scale redundancy. In Jamshedpur however, the aim of casualisation
was instead to preserve the city's large and steady industrial workforce; but at
a lower cost and with less capacity for collective bargaining. The exercise of
extreme violence was a partial means to secure this aim, and in this regard, the
union proved themselves to be effective allies to company interests.
The popular perception among my interlocutors in Jamshedpur was that
neo-liberal economic change had proceeded with the support of an
institutional corruption that was characterised by the mutual aid of political
and union influence, goonda violence and industrial capital. Corruption in this
context is directed towards wealth generation, and serves to create and
maintain a class of those able to negotiate such practice (Szeftel 2000: 303).
Reinforcing the popular discourse of corruption were not only the violent
scandals surrounding the union and Tata company, but also the equally well
publicised criminality of the states politicians, which helped to consolidate an
image of institutional corruption that intersected closely with organised
criminal violence.
Chief among the states political scandals were the activities of Sibu
Soren, the first leader of the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha party who, in 1993 was
centrally implicated in a bribes for votes scandal. During this affair, Congress
Prime Minister, Narashima Rao had allegedly paid members of Sorens party
in excess of Rs1Crore to support the government in a vote of no confidence.
One year later, Sibu Sorens aide had allegedly attempted to blackmail him

171
with information relating to the bribe; his body was discovered in a
Jharkhandi forest in 1999 and a painfully slow murder investigation against
Soren opened. In the years since the aides body was found, Soren went on to
become the first chief minister of the Jharkhand state and the Coal Minister of
the national government. During his tenure as Cabinet Minister, he spent one
year behind bars and several months in hiding, actually absconding whilst on
bail.
In November 2006, Soren was convicted of his aides murder, receiving a
life sentence in prison. After serving only nine months of this sentence, his
conviction was overturned on the grounds that the identity of the aides body
could not be established beyond reasonable doubt. Soren walked free from
Dumka Jail in Jharkhand on August 25, 2007 and a year later, on August 27,
2008, was once again reinstated as the state's Chief Minster.
While languages of corruption in Jamshedpur may draw on the wider
model of Kali Yug social decline, they are far from provincial reckonings of
morality and custom (Pinney 1999). Corruption is popularly utilised as an
explicitly legal category, and draws its cues from media discussions of the
violent actions of state politicians and trade unionists. Guptas analysis of
corruption discourse in local north Indian media reveals an everyday
perception that somewhere there exists a moral centre from which the
financial self interest of provincial bureaucrats deviates (Gupta 1995). In
Jamshedpur the same methodology reveals the rather different perception
that violent criminality in the provinces is closely related to the political
interests of a corrupted central government and the financial interests of
industrial conglomerates. Alpa Shahs recent work on Maoism in Jharkhand
would seem to suggest that this scepticism and fear of state institutions is far
from a simply urban phenomenon (Shah 2006).
The type of corruption that I turn my attention to in this article is
therefore distinct from that in much Indianist scholarship in which the motor
of corruption is the satisfaction of a short term, local and individual interest,
primarily manifested as bribery (Das 2001; Gupta 1995; Parry 2000). In
Jamshedpur, the corruption in question is the systematised practice of
institutions and the state, and is directed towards long term interests, having a
closer resonance to Robert Wades work on agricultural irrigation corruption
in South India (Wade 1982). Where Wades context and that discussed here
most notably differ, is that in Jamshedpur, while corruption is often focussed
upon industry and business, its methods are perceived to be at least partly
violent.
In Jharkhand, corruption discourses such as those surrounding the
murder of VG Gopal or the criminality of politicians, refer directly to ongoing
relationships between state authority, capital and violence. These discourses
are primarily political, and illuminate local conceptions of industrial capitalism
and the nature of institutional authority. Where discourses of petty corruption
across India may well identify the immorality of provincial individuals (Gupta
1995), in Jamshedpur they pertain to a far wider perception of the state as an



172
assemblage of corrupt and at times dangerous elites, united in their pursuit of
capital.
What makes these discourses particularly illuminating is that they are not
simply a discursive reaction to the structural inequalities of a transforming
company town; such a perspective would suggest local corruption discourse to
be something of a weapon of the weak (Scott 1985). On the contrary,
although corruption discourse may well enable a moral critique of social elites,
such commentaries are nonetheless remarkably incisive, building models of
elite cooperation that are often founded on the facts of daily life; either
directly experienced, or engaged with in the criminal trials of politicians and
trade unionists.
Parry incisively notes that Indian bureaucratic corruption is often
something of a self fulfilling, yet mystifying prophecy, fuelled by the self-
aggrandisement of corrupt middle men, for whom the public perception of
the crisis of corruption is a means to demand larger and more frequent
bribes (Parry 2000). In this analysis, corruption discourses are essentially
hegemonic, stimulating those that engage with them to part with resources in
order to secure a reward that is never likely to materialise. Constructed in the
context of high levels of violent crime and a historical precedent for
institutional violence, the corruption discourse in Jamshedpur is altogether a
less mystified type of commentary one that points towards actual, rather than
imagined political and economic processes. In the latter sections of this article,
the incisiveness of this model is tested against the activities of two city
entrepreneurs, for whom business negotiations with corrupt institutions are
indeed frequently coloured by violence.
Corruption in Jamshedpur cannot be reduced to either the business of
bureaucracies or the stuff of subjective public discourse, since the self interest
of corrupt actors intersects so notably with the interests of industrial
capitalism, and is sporadically fulfilled by well substantiated incidents of
organised criminal violence. While anthropological analyses of India have
generally failed to pay sufficient attention to these dynamics, useful analytic
frameworks from different ethnographic contexts have drawn attention to the
arenas in which corruption, violence and capital routinely intersect, inviting a
more proper consideration of the role of both corruption and violence in
capitalism (Arlacchi 1983, 1986; Gambetta 1993; Handelman 1994; Herzfeld
2009; Kang 2002; Varese 2005; Volkov 2002; Yurchak 2002).
In Jamshedpur, one can usefully talk of the profitable relationship
between capital and violence, which, in the context of newly liberalised post
socialist economies, Vadim Volkov has termed the enforcement partnership
(Volkov 2002). In Volkovs context rather than acting as an obstacle to the
market (see Galeotti 1998), violent entrepreneurs effectively underwrite the
fragile contracts of emerging capitalism through the threat of physical harm
(Varese 2005; Volkov 2002). The environment is marked by rapidly expanding
opportunity in large scale industry, coupled with corrupted state authority.
This form of organised crime is distinct from the informal barter networks

173
described by Caroline Humphrey and others, which although reliant upon a
similar dynamic of entrepreneurship and institutional corruption, are focussed
upon the popular demand for everyday essentials (Humphrey 2002; Lovell et
al 2000).
What makes the enforcement partnership framework particularly useful
for a reading of Jharkhandi corruption is that it enables one to consider the
role of violence and coercion in long-term relationships between mutually
constituted forms of authority. This perspective allows for a theorising of the
rather amorphous and often misleading category of organised crime in terms
of institutional negotiations, rather than considering it as a discrete type of
structure, thereby bridging the misleading analytic schism between
corruption and criminality. The Jharkhandi mafia, like its cousins in
Mumbai and Bihar may lack the codes of honour, ties of kinship and centrality
of vendetta that popularly characterise its Sicilian namesake (Blok 1974).
However, even a rather cursory historical survey of the Sicilian Mafia shows
its origins to be firmly economic and political, resting in the feudal patronage
of post-unification Italy (Arlacchi 1983, 1986). Like both its Sicilian and
Russian counterparts, the Jharkhandi mafia is marked by a tenacious
economic logic and as I approached the acephalous crime structure in
Jamshedpur I saw that its potential members were more accurately business
partners and were drawn from a variety of castes, ethnicities and class
backgrounds, each united by the pursuit of capital in a markedly corrupt
industrial economy. Already well documented in Post-Soviet and Italian
ethnography, my focus upon this dynamic in Jamshedpur questions the ways
in which Anthropology has commonly theorised South Asian corruption as an
essentially bureaucratic, personal and non-violent phenomenon.
In the following sections of this article I use ethnographic cases studies of
two city research participants in order to discuss the logic and character of
criminal enterprise in Jamshedpur. As suggested by popular corruption
discourses, the extent to which these individuals enterprises are successful are
dependent upon the mastery of something akin to an enforcement partnership
logic; a logic that has been so central to both the casualisation of labour in
Jamshedpur and the wider operation of Jharkhandi politics.

Rishi and the MP: Criminal Entrepreneurship

On arriving in Jamshedpur for the first time in January 2006, I quickly made
the acquaintance of 26 year old Suchir, a native of Kolkata, who much like
myself had recently found himself seconded to the city on a work assignment.
Suchir worked for the finance division of General Electric Money, the loans
department of the US multinational. His task in Jamshedpur was to assess
hire-purchase applications for motorcycles. As part of his job, Suchir was
required to liaise with a local financial services firm which collected weekly
payments from the citys mainly young, male and unrealistically indebted
motorcyclists. Suchirs Jamshedpur contact was the debt collecting firms



174
owner, Rishi, who operated out of a large home and office in one of the citys
slums.
Although homesick for the fun and thrills of Kolkata, Suchir initially
professed that Jamshedpur was a fine place; very clean and quiet, and with a
good standard of living. However, as our first weeks in the city passed, Suchir
became increasingly agitated. He began to express both a mounting concern
for his safety and weariness towards what he perceived to be the latent
violence of the city, somewhat reproducing the Jungle Raj discourse. He
would often tell me that he did not understand the people of Jharkhand, he
felt that they were aggressive and violent and commented: Boss, I have seen
these things before in films you know, but until I came to this place I hadnt
known that it was real, this is the place where it is happening
Suchir had hitherto equated organised crime and serious violence with
their Bollywood portrayals; where gangsters drive fast cars, dress in black and
spend the greater proportion of their time engaged in dangerous liaisons with
enigmatic women. Quite unexpectedly, the seemingly legitimate business of
hire-purchase bought Suchir into contact with all manner of threatening
characters in Jamshedpur, many of whom were members of the citys elites
and could wield substantial political, legal and violent influence in their
favour. Quite unexpectedly, in Jamshedpur Suchir found himself playing a
part, albeit minor, in a real life Mafia movie, in which there was no glitz, easy
women, quotable lines or indeed fun. Suchir confided to me in June 2006, that
Sunil Mahato MP was trying to force him into awarding one of his goondas a
lucrative collections contract, the very contract in fact presently held by Rishi.
Sunil Mahato was not only the citys Member of Parliament and the bane
of the local Naxal Brigade, he was also well known as one of its chief
organised crime figures. In addition to his interests in debt collection, Mahato
was also purported to run a protection racket among the citys illegal alcohol
stalls and to be engaged in the traffic of stolen heavy minerals. Suchir did not
have the ability to award Mahatos goondas any form of contract, since he was
nowhere near senior enough. Nonetheless, he had been targeted by a group of
men that phoned him several times in the period of a week with a series of
ever more explicit threats. The popular corruption discourses of Jamshedpur,
which identified the mutual dependency of industrial capitalism, the state,
elite institutions and violence were reasonably well substantiated in their
analysis of Sunil Mahato, whose purported criminality I must confess to have
initially approached as something of a discursive weapon of the weak (Scott
1985). However, as more of my fieldwork interlocutors began to profess
personal experiences of extortion and coercion by Mahatos entourage, I was
compelled to regard such critiques less as discourses, and more as grass roots
analyses of actual processes.
What makes Mahatos business practice particularly apt for an
enforcement partnership rather than corruption analysis is that his
negotiations with Suchir were not driven by any logic of bribery, which is to
say that he did not attempt to offer any form of remuneration for receiving

175
tender. In Parrys framework of the relative moral and ethical content of
Indian bribery a useful delineation is drawn between the Gift, the
Commission and the Bribe (Parry 2000). Mahato bypassed this pan-Indian
corruption etiquette entirely and progressed simply to the threat of violence; a
potentially powerful means of mediating his economic negotiations.
After a week of threatening phone calls, Mahatos goondas eventually
arrived at Suchirs office to discuss the issue face to face, where they
threatened to shoot him. Panicking, Suchir did the only thing he could, and
gave them the office number of his supervisor in Kolkata. Surprisingly, this
proved to be the right tactic, as the goondas set about harassing his superior
instead. Any personalised threat against Suchir quickly dissolved following
the goondas recognition of his personal inability to improve their profit
margin.
Sunil Mahatos threats were understandably a source of some worry to
both Suchir and I, and some weeks after the incident I was able to discuss the
issue with Rishi, Suchirs debt collecting contact. Rishis family, who were of
Yadav caste, had migrated from Eastern Utter Pradesh in the early 1900s,
and had worked in the Tata Steel plant for four generations. Rishi was
something of the archetypal self-made-man and despite being a successful
entrepreneur, he still lived in one of the citys mainly Adivasi slums, in the
house in which he had been born. In recent years he had since greatly
expanded the building with various extensions and had built a two storey
office at the front of the property from where he ran his business. As he told
me one evening: I live in a slum, but I compensate for it by having the biggest
house.
Then 38 years old, Rishi had graduated from a Tata mixed English/Hindi
secondary school 20 years earlier, and enrolled on an accountancy degree at a
local college. During his degree he had worked nights as a petrol station
attendant on the Sakchi highway, where he was robbed at gun point several
times. Whilst studying, he had married a beautiful young woman from his
neighbourhood in a scandalous elopement that divided both of their families.
During some years of isolation, the couple lived alone in a distant part of the
city where his wife was cruelly taunted by their neighbours almost every time
she ventured outdoors. Both of their lives had taken a turn for the better
when the couple were reconciled to Rishis parents after the birth of their first
child, a boy. They were able to return to his family home, where he discovered
that his now ageing parents enjoyed the company of his wife, and were glad to
have the house full again.
After graduating from university, and vowing to never again work nights
in a petrol station, Rishi had practised as an accountant for several years. He
had then begun to branch into small scale money lending and debt collection,
and at the time of fieldwork, his chief source of income was his collections
contract with General Electric Money. Rishi had come into the world of
goondas, debts and violence more through accident than design. Whilst being
necessarily well connected to the citys criminal infrastructure, Rishi was not a



176
personally intimidating figure. In the company of his friends, parents, wife and
children, Rishi was a generous and easy-going individual; well spoken and
possessed of the type of charm which inspires phrases such as instantly
likeable.
The men of honour model, which portrays gangsters as readily
recognisable and drawn from a culture and symbol system of criminality, is an
inadequate tool with which to approach Rishi Yadav (Handelman 1994). Rishi
did not come from an obviously criminal background, neither could his
present actions be readily identified as simply criminal. Rishis daily business
practice relied upon negotiations of corrupt political influence, financial self
interest, coercion and sporadic violence. His experience points towards both
an understanding of criminality that is more politically and economically
systematic, and an understanding of corruption that is more closely wedded to
criminality. An ethnographic exploration of Rishis daily business enables one
to identify the points at which the popular corruption discourses of
Jamshedpur may indeed find their mirror in daily life.
Defying the outlaw gangster image of popular film, Rishi was the
collections agent to a large American conglomerate and to the less astute
observer may well have appeared as a thoroughly respectable business man
(Ruth 1996). He was not required to undergo any test or deprivation in order
to become a goonda, he had in fact been trained as an accountant. Rishi had
rather vaguely drifted into his work by simply being prepared and capable of
making money through the complementary use of violence and influence. He
felt no pride or honour in his endeavours that I could see, and no real aversion
to the forces of law and order since it was often through his own close
negotiations with the state that he avoided imprisonment himself. On several
occasions, admittedly usually while intoxicated, he lamented that his work was
that of, to use his own term, a goonda, a fact that caused him some shame.
In recent years, Rishi had become relatively well known in the city, and
was regarded as a competent businessman with a successful record of
collecting debts without the frequent use of violence- something which many
of his prominent clients preferred. However, Rishi was also known as having
the right contacts at his disposal to enact coercion should he wish to do so, and
his debt collecting services were in high demand in a setting in which there
was popular perception of the corruption of state institutions and the risk of
everyday violence (Volkov 2002). Coercion then, like the use of political and
judicial contacts, was but one avenue through which Rishi was able to pursue
profitable business opportunities.
The vast majority of Rishis work involved filing for court orders, calling
debtors on their mobile phones, completing reports for General Electric and
the leg-work of travelling about the city collecting and recording weekly
payments. However, in a minority of cases, clients would refuse payment after
repeated phone calls and verbal threats. In these cases the first port of call
would be to establish whether the vehicle (in the case of his General Electric
contract) was still at the clients home, in which case an effort would be made

177
to repossess it, usually illegally, that is to say, a member of the firm would
steal the vehicle in the early hours of the morning, and hold it at Rishis office
for collection by a General Electric agent. If neither the vehicle nor money
were immediately forthcoming, Rishi told me that in about five per cent of
cases (his figure): We are getting a little rough with the customer.
Being acquainted with such activities, Rishi was unsurprised at Sunil
Mahatos threats to Suchir, and saw these as an expected hazard of doing
business in the town; neither was he surprised that the perpetrator was an
elected member of parliament. Rishi, whilst a man with notable criminal
contacts which he wielded against unfortunate debtors, was himself immersed
in a wider dynamic of influence and coercion of which he was sporadically a
victim. Chiefly, he had been the focus of several extortion demands by
Jamshedpurs politically connected goondas whom he held in low moral
regard. Indeed, Rishi was of the opinion that rather than precluding ones
engagement with criminality, political connections were in fact a prerequisite
to any successful criminal career.
Rishis own corruption discourse reproduced a model of elite
cooperation that bore a marked similarity to that voiced by the
disenfranchised casual workers of the Tata Motors plant. Although a
relatively low-level agent in the influence/violence/capital dynamic, Rishis
assessment of the mechanics of corruption and criminality is nonetheless a
valuable commentary from inside such processes, rather than a discursive
appraisal from afar. Whilst discussing the threats to Suchirs life, I put it to
him that the Jharkhand Mukti Morchas local elite were essentially a criminal
syndicate, he agreed. I asked whether he believed this to be the case with, for
example, the BJP.
10
He responded:

Look, you have the tribal people here in Jamshedpur, and their goondas
are the JMM, and you have the BJP, and they are the Brahman goondas,
and then there are the RJD, and they are like me, they are the Yadavs.
But, they are goondas too. All of them are goondasif you are a big
goonda and you have some charge against you, what can you do? You
will be caught eventually, and you will go to prison. So you simply must
become a politician and then get the charges dropped. That is why there
are so many criminals in politics

Rishi held local financial, industrial, political and criminal infrastructures
to function on the basis of mutually beneficial cooperation between goondas,
netas and state institutions. Rishis observation that the states various
political parties were composed of distinct ethnic and caste groups is generally
speaking a valid one. However, what became clear during the period of my
association with Rishi was that goondas did not restrict their activities
endogamously to their own communities, neither could they operate their
businesses in the absence of inter ethnic cooperation. Rishi navigated the
spheres of sporadically criminal city authority with a great deal of skill,



178
primarily through employing workers of varying ethnic and caste backgrounds
on the basis of their differing abilities, political and criminal connections.
Rishi's firm was something of a microcosm in which the logics and processes
of Jharkhandi corruption, criminality and business were enacted on a daily
basis.
Rishis office staff included a number of smart young middle class
Bengali women whose well-spoken phone calls connected the narrow streets
of the slum with clean cut businessmen in Kolkata. He also employed a distant
relation of Sunil Mahato who undertook many of the firms negotiations with
the towns Adivasi politicians, as well as two young Punjabi men who had
good working relationships with Jamshedpurs mainly Sikh merchant class. In
addition, he employed the Adivasi husband of a local female police officer,
despite regarding him as exceptionally slow-witted. Through this relationship
he was able to stay on good terms with the local police force and to be kept
abreast of any impending charges to be filed against him.
Rishi kept the police officers in his neighbourhood well remunerated
with small bribes of money and alcohol, which ensured that any complaint
against him was highly unlikely to make it even as far as a charge sheet, let
alone a court room. On one occasion when accused of illegally repossessing a
car on the orders of a national bank. A FIR (First Information Report) was
lodged against him with the local police who accordingly came to his home
and asked for Rs30, 000 (375). Rishi paid the amount and subsequently the
case never surfaced again. On another occasion a debtor in the city made an
allegation of assault against a member of his collecting team: an allegation
which I would assess to be certainly well founded. After hearing the
complaint, the police in the area came immediately to Rishis home, and in my
presence, believing me to speak no Hindi, asked for Rs13, 000 (162). After
the sum was paid, the case was never followed up or even filed.
In order to negotiate the enforcement aspect of his partnerships, Rishi
also employed a member of the Jamshedpur criminal gang headed by
Akhilesh Singh, the Mafia Don (a local term) who was himself the son of the
Jharkhand Police Association Secretary, Chandra Gupta Singh. Rishis
contact in the gang, Ragu, was a Bihari Rajput. In contrast to Rishi, Ragu was
a man of few words, powerfully built and with an invariably deadpan
expression. He would occasionally arrive at the firms social gatherings
bearing injuries which he had earned in the service of collecting General
Electric payments. Rishis business was therefore based around a series of
negotiations with a wide variety of individuals and institutions of various
caste, class, ethnic and work backgrounds, some of whom were obviously
criminal, some of whom were probably legitimate but most of whom were
both as and when necessary. This was how the misleadingly named
Jharkhandi Mafia, Jamshedpurs business world and corrupted state
institutions worked.
What Rishi and Suchirs experiences reveal is the exceptionally close,
and in many cases mutually dependent relationship between politics, capital

179
and violence in Jharkhand. This dynamic requires a re-conceptualisation of
South Asian corruption that can explain those instances where criminality
and violence relate to capitalism and the state in ways that are integral (rather
than incidental) to their functioning. In the following section this model is
supported counterfactually by the discussion of a less successful goonda; an
individual whose forays into criminal entrepreneurship were defined by a lack
of access to the resources of corrupted institutions and were, as such,
markedly less profitable.

Wheeling and Dealing: Criminal Aspirations

For a number of Jamshedpurs unemployed sons, criminal entrepreneurship
presented itself as a route to the status and economic security presently
lacking in the citys industrial economy. During the period of research,
younger men from traditional Tata backgrounds seemed highly receptive to
the charms of what would be best termed in colloquial English as Wheeling
and Dealing, or in Hindi as Lena Dena.
11
To provide for oneself through
shrewdness and enterprise embodied a spirit of entrepreneurship that was
distinct from the frustrated submission to the uncertainty of casual Tata
employment.
The notion of the self determining, resourceful criminal entrepreneur in
Jamshedpur was reminiscent of the wily, loveable gangster in Bollywood films;
fictional folk heroes such as Sanjay Dutts Munna Bhai from the immensely
popular film franchise of the same name and his side kick, Circuit, played by
Arshad Warsi. Such characterisations were part of a modern mythic arena of
film, from which Jamshedpurs aspiring badmarshs
12
drew their archetypes of
success, daring, charisma and an undeniable aesthetic sensibility (Osella and
Osella 2004:224). Several unemployed Munna Bhais in Jamshedpur had hopes
that my personal connections with the West could facilitate their criminal
scams. Chief among these individuals was 21 year old Lucky.
Lucky was the jobless son of a former Tata Tinplate Co. employee. Being
unemployed, he was financially supported by his fathers early retirement
settlement. For Lucky, criminal entrepreneurship was one of the short-term
means through which he endeavoured to attain some degree of financial
security and status. Unlike Rishi, Lucky embodied the Munna Bhai aesthetic,
opting to remain clean shaven and drawing his fashion cues from Bollywood
music videos. With his fathers money, excellent English and links to his
brother resident in London, Lucky was able to play the badmarsh-about-town
rather well, and was part of a crowd of heavy drinking young Punjabi men that
congregated each evening at the end of my street. Lucky was always smartly
dressed in the latest city fashions (white trainers, tight bleached jeans and T
shirts with English slogans), and would spend most of his time drinking
outside a nearby liquor store, or touring about the city on the silver Enfield
motorcycle which was his pride and joy.
Lucky was fairly typical of an early retirement package son; although he



180
probably had a couple more years of idle roaming to look forward to, this
could not feasibly last for ever. Eventually either his fathers funds or patience
would be exhausted; at which time Luckys probability of securing well paid
employment did not appear high, since he lacked any discernible skills and
possessed only a school leaving certificate. Luckys lack of employment
furthermore made his likelihood of a good marriage in the near future very
slim.
However, impending doom aside, for the time being, Lucky was a man of
leisure whos life revolved around socializing with a close knit group of friends
and staying far from the closely applied and diplomatic work ethic of Rishi
Yadavs office. A typical day would be for Lucky to rise at a scandalously late
hour, watch TV, eat lunch and then ride his bike to the park with a friend.
There, he would lust after girls for several hours until it was dark enough to
drink beer in the street with companions. This would continue until ten or
eleven at night, from where the gang would ride to some distant part of the
city to eat snacks in a cheap eatery and vainly attempt to buy more alcohol.
On many evenings, these roaming parties would end in one or several of the
group becoming drunk to the point of vomiting in the street. Perhaps not
surprisingly there was a ubiquity of minor motorcycle accidents at Luckys
social gatherings.
When not drinking or riding his bike, Lucky was constantly engaged in
some imagined scam or another; always having a plan in the pipe line that
never quite came to fruition, and which quite typically of such entrepreneurs
relied heavily on his forging personal relations with individuals of particular
capacities or potentials (Pesmen 2000). One evening in summer 2006 Lucky
asked that I meet him in a bar to discuss a personal problem. Apparently his
elder brother had been living illegally in London for the past 6 months, having
overstayed his tourist visa whilst working in his uncles convenience store.
Luckys suggestion was that I locate an English woman who would be
prepared marry his brother in return for a cash consideration. He believed this
to be a quick route to UK citizenship.
Lucky and his father offered me Rs1 Lakh (approximately 1,250) to find
a willing spouse. They advised that I could pay the brides fee from my own
payment, and that its amount would be at my discretion. Luckys proposal also
had a more decidedly entrepreneurial edge; he went on to outline a long term
business plan whereby his family and I could repeat the scam at regular
intervals, flooding London with mainly Punjabi men from Jamshedpur. I
learnt that Luckys father had been working on this plan almost since our first
introduction. Lucky himself claimed to already have approached around a
dozen local men who were found willing to emigrate to the UK, where to my
horror they had been told that I would find women to marry them. Although
quite evidently a less than sincere form of modern global marriage (Lucky
ventured that his suitors would divorce their brides in a matter of months after
satisfying the UK Home Office), Luckys marriage scam is nonetheless a
fascinating inversion of what has been termed the global hypergamy of cross-

181
border marriage (Constable 2005). The received wisdom of global hypergamy
dictates that brides move from the impoverished regions of the global south to
join grooms in the affluent global north. In this understanding, women seek
the promises of future prosperity by cleaving to men in permanent bonds of
marriage (ibid; Tadiar 2003). For Luckys would-be migrs, this dynamic is
inverted, with southern men seeking to exploit temporary, legal relationships
with northern women as a means to realise ambitions.
Ethical quandaries aside,
13
the plan was quite evidently doomed to
failure, lacking anything like a realistic capital investment, and no means at all
of negotiating with the more violent local entrepreneurs who would almost
certainly have demanded some if not all of the business for themselves. In
addition to his foreign marriage scam, during the same year Lucky also went
on to begin a business relationship with a corrupt member of the Ranchi civil
service who pledged to help him procure fake Indian passports for members
of Jamshedpurs criminal underworld; presumably should they have the need
for swift emigration themselves. The scheme had little success, and Luckys
relationship with his partner was ultimately severed over a financial dispute; a
dispute in which Lucky was unlikely to emerge the victor, lacking as he did the
capital to invest in the use of violence.
Luckys numerous schemes, scams and plans were attempts to enter into
the ongoing series of financial and political negotiations which may be termed
Jharkhandi organised crime, a practice which has the capacity to engender
economic stability in its participants where for Lucky Tata employment had
failed to do so. However, in his enterprises Lucky had missed one important
part of the criminal success equation, which holds true as much for
Jamshedpurs Goondas as Vadim Volkovs Violent Entrepreneurs in the
former USSR (Volkov 2002). The most successful entrepreneurs, like Rishi
Yadav and Sibu Soren were those that could invest legitimate influence,
significant capital and unassailable violence into their endeavours. Lucky had
none of these resources in abundance, and was perhaps rather lead astray by
the romanticised Munna Bhai portrayal.
In the cinematic portrayal of organised crime one is able to negotiate a
dangerous world that is yet still ripe with entrepreneurial potential (Ruth
1996). Part of the reason why this portrayal is so appealing to the Luckys of
the world is that it implies success from peculiarly personalised investments. If
one is dangerous, brave, charming and resourceful, then in the Munna Bhai
universe success is sure to follow; an understanding routinely reproduced by
respondents in studies of low level criminal gang culture (Bourgois 2003;
Whyte 1993). Luckys negotiations with specialists such as his civil service
contact reveal his recognition of the centrality of institutional politicking to
entrepreneurial success; echoing Yurchaks discussion of such entrepreneurs
as valves which operate between both bureaucratic and highly personalised
public spheres (Yurchak 2002). However, Luckys experience broke with that
of more successful entrepreneurs in his inevitable over reliance on charismatic
investments. Until the much longed for ticket to London did arrive, Lucky



182
continued to fruitlessly pursue his Lena Dena fantasies while the citys real
Goondas went about their business with a more highly attuned political
sensibility, and quite possibly less of an eye for popular fashion.

Conclusion

What Rishi and Luckys corresponding successes and failures reveal is the
ways in which Jharkhandi criminality, business and corruption may work as
interdependent forms of capital accumulation, rather than as distinct social
phenomenon. This insight, whilst seldom articulated in South Asian research,
is nonetheless not a particularly new one. Across different ethnographic
contexts, understandings of criminality and state corruption routinely benefit
from a close analytic focus on the ways in which such practices not only
intersect, but serve the interests of capitalism; particularly, it must be said, in
contexts of economic liberalisation (Arlacchi 1983, 1986; Gambetta 1993;
Handelman 1994; Herzfeld 2009; Kang 2002; Varese 2005; Volkov 2002;
Yurchak 2002). My intention here then is quite simply to suggest that these
dynamics are replicated in the still-liberalizing industrial zones of India, where
corruption and criminality are not only mutually reinforcing, but play a central
role in consolidating the interests of capitalism, be it though the everyday
violence of debt collection or the suppression of collective action in industry.
Quite evidently, the Wild West model of impetuous regional violence is
both a misleading and prejudicial one, which I hope to have deconstructed
through a discussion of applied violence and corrupt institutional negotiation.
In national media discourses of the Wild West model, Jharkhandi criminality
is inaccurately constructed as a regressive provincial force that is distinct from,
rather than inculcated within national politics and neo-liberal capitalism
(Kang 2002). Despite the evocative nature of their media portrayals,
provincial goondas are not modern-day Billy the Kids, executing senseless
violence in the dusty towns of the Jharkhandi frontier; they are rather violent
entrepreneurs, whose success relies upon their close relationships with
corrupted institutional authority. The nature of these relationships is dyadic,
which is to say, at pivotal moments in the citys recent history, Jamshedpurs
goondas have proven themselves to be key agents in the progression of neo-
liberal economic change. What makes this context of particular analytic
interest is the extent to which local discourses identify the political and
economic negotiations that facilitate this corruption.
Situated against a pervasive public assumption of criminalised elite
mutual aid, I argue that the ethnography of Rishi Yadavs office suggests
there to be a remarkable degree of insight and political consciousness on the
part of Jharkhandi corruption discourses. Discourses of elite immorality and
violence in Jamshedpur are not metaphorical commentaries on the
contradictions and inequalities of capitalism (Comaroff and Comaroff 1993;
Scheper Hughes 2000), they are not localised and personalised appraisals of
conveniently visible individuals (Das 2001; Gupta 1995), neither are they

183
hegemonic assumptions that serve the interests of those to whom they are
directed (Parry 2000). Rather they are incisive and often accurate appraisals
of the operation of capitalism and state politics
Jharkhandi corruption discourses are born from a high level of
institutional violence and a rapidly changing economic and industrial
environment. The corruption discourses that this context inspires are directed
towards the ways in which mutually constitutive forms of power are inculcated
in the functioning of a liberalised industrial economy. These commentaries
eschew subjective metaphors and instead speak directly to actual moments of
corruption, violence and economic change. The nature of these discourses is
political (in the more precise sense of the term), in that it they are directed
towards the collective negotiations that facilitate corruption and criminality,
rather than the individual moralities that pertain to them. This focus on the
negotiations of corruption serves an important function vis--vis the Jungle
Raj model, in so much as that it has the capacity to de-provincialise regional
violence; relating the coercion and criminality of Jharkhandi goondas to the
ostensibly legitimate authority of central government and global industrial
conglomerates.
Whilst the everyday frustrations of bureaucratic corruption may well
impact directly on the lives of millions of Indians; giving rise to an accelerating
momentum of public crisis, in Jamshedpur, corruption refers to something
altogether more systemic and yet still more tangible. The corruption in
question is the mutually beneficial relationship between political influence,
violence and industrial capital in a company town economy; illuminated,
rather than obscured by popular discourses.

Acknowledgements
The entirety of the field research for this article was funded by an Economic and
Social Research Council Studentship (October 2004-September 2008). A version
of this article was presented in March 2010 at the Contemporary South Asia
Seminar of the School of Interdisciplinary Area Studies, University of Oxford. I
thank the participants of that seminar, and two anonymous reviewers at The
Journal of Legal Anthropology for helpful comments on the material

Biographical note
Andrew Sanchez is a fellow in the Anthropology department of the LSE, where
he obtained his PhD in 2009. His current research in Jamshedpur, Jharkhand
looks at the role played by trade union corruption and organised crime in the
erosion of formal sector employment security.



184
Notes

1
'Broken vow led to killing', The Telegraph (2007). Jamshedpur edition.

2
Hindi idiom for sycophant. Literally: spoon.

3
Sections of this official statement initially appeared in several English language daily
newspapers in the region. At the time of writing, the full version of the statement is also
available at the following CPI (Maoist) affiliated website:
www.resistanceindia.wordpress.com (posted April 9, 2007; accessed most recently May 31,
2010).

4
Indias Wild West, Times of India (2007).

5
Popular Indian idiom for gangster. Literally: thug or hooligan

6
Jharkhands formation follows 40 years of petitioning from tribal interest groups, who
have historically claimed the southern areas of Bihar to be a homeland for the
autochthonous peoples of the region; mainly those from the Ho, Munda, Santal and Oraon
Adivasi communities. However, whilst the state has a tribal population of 26.3%, there is a
pronounced lack of integration between the states urban industrial regions and poorer
rural communities. The Census of India, 2001, records an official city population of
1,104,713: of that number, barely 12% are members of scheduled tribes. For discussions of
the Jharkhand movement see Corbridge (1988, 2000, 2002); Devalle (1992); Weiner (1978)

7
Statement On Industrial Policy, Government of India, Ministry of Industry, New Delhi,
July 24, 1991: 7, 5.

8
The Telegraph (2003), India, quotes a CBI official: Shukla and Sahu were the key
figures and their arrests would have enabled us to track down the main conspirators
involved in the murder case. But so far, there has been no trace of either Shukla or Sahu.
We fear that they might have been killed by the conspirators for obvious reasons.

9
The Industrial Disputes Act (1947) makes no stipulation that there be a sole bargaining
agent on a given shopfloor. Rather, the act legislates that any group of workers may,
through the agency of five elected representatives, engage in collective bargaining with
their employer. Importantly, there is no requirement for these representatives to be
formally registered through the procedure described in Section two of the Trade Unions
Act (1926). Legislatively therefore, Tata is both able and obliged to negotiate with an
unspecified number of worker organisations, even those that are not officially registered as
unions. However, existing convention and the pervasive influence of political patronage
make all of Jamshedpur's Tata industries effective closed shops. The convention in the
event of their being a multiplicity of rival unions on a shop floor is for industry to follow the
Code of Discipline agreed at the 16th session of the Indian Labour Conference (May 1958).
The Code of Discipline privileges the recognition of officially registered unions, and sets
out guidelines for arbitrating the legitimacy of two such organisations in the workplace.
Whilst the Code of Discipline has no legislative weight to speak of, the ubiquity of its use
make its model of sole trade union recognition the norm in states not already covered by
the more rigid Industrial Relations Bill (1978).

10
Bharatiya Janata Party. A conservative national political party, closely aligned to the
Hindu Nationalist movement.
11
Popular Hindi idiom for negotiation. Literally: Give and Take

12
Hindi idiom for rascal. In colloquial UK English, perhaps wideboy.
13
Studies of street cultures (Bourgois 2003) have frequently stressed the cultural edifices
surrounding criminality. In these contexts, criminality is often culturally inaccessible to the
researcher, perhaps minimizing a very particular form of ethical dilemma, which is the
extent to which ones interlocutors expect and desire ones business partnership. In
Jamshedpur however, the criminality in question pertained to no particular culture, and
was in fact a form of reasonably rational entrepreneurship. As such, many of my contacts

185
saw no reason why I should not myself engage in their forms of business, and viewed my
presence as an as yet untapped source of capital accumulation. Towards the very end of
fieldwork I was surprised to discover that several of Rishis employees had believed me to
be a business man myself, engaged in a long term working relationship with Rishi. My
close research participants however were aware of my position as a researcher, and after
some time, even of my emerging political perspective on their practice. Rishi and I would
often discuss the moral quandaries surrounding his business; discussions that he entered
into with candour and critical self evaluation. For wider discussions on the ethical dilemmas
of research on violence and criminality, see Bourgois (2003) and Gilsenan (2002).

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Legislation and Resolutions

Code of Discipline For Recognition of Trade Unions: Indian Labour Conference,
16th Session, May 1958
The Industrial Disputes Act, 1947
The Industrial Relations Bill, 1978
Statement On Industrial Policy: Government of India, Ministry of Industry, New
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Trade Unions Act, 1926

Dr Andrew Sanchez
LSE Fellow
Department of Anthropology
London School of Economics and Political Science
Houghton Street
London WC2A 2AE
Email:A.Sanchez1@lse.ac.uk

Capitalism Violence and The State - Crime Corruption and Entrepreneurship in An Indian Company Town

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Journal of Legal Anthropology (2010) Vol. 1, No.

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